Slaying In the Seventies
The Devil’s Rejects
Starring Bill Moseley, Sid Haig and Sheri Moon Zombie
Written and directed by Rob Zombie
Lions Gate Films
Rob Zombie, like Quentin Tarantino before him, is a fan filmmaker; he makes films about other films. You don’t accuse a director like that of ripping off, that’s a given. The question is whether he rips off well, whether the borrowed pieces make something new or unique. Of course, back when House of 1000 Corpses came out, I thought things couldn’t get worse. Even if you dug Zombie’s carnival of grinning monsters, you can’t deny the flick was little more than a horror fan with $7 million dollars and not a single clue about telling a story.
News of a second film nevertheless sat well with us here at Rue Morgue, given our belief that those dire results were simply the product of inexperience. All Zombie needed was a few well-placed criticisms and a little advice to steer him in the right direction. Judging by how The Devil’s Rejects turned out, I think we may have been right.
No, Zombie’s latest doesn’t add anything new to the genre, but it does miraculously play out like an actual movie; it has a storyline, a plot, and some mean-spirited gore – elements absent from the first film. And though his ongoing adoration for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre continues unabated, Zombie’s decision to put his cast of killers on the road and ditch their dopey cartoonish mugging makes The Devil’s Rejects play out like the kind of film everyone thought House was gonna be – a retrofied, nasty horror homage.
The flick picks up where the last one, er “left off” with cops crashing in on the Firefly clan as they lounge in their dingy corpse-ridden house. Otis (Moseley) and Baby (Moon) duck bullets and hook up with chicken champ Captain Spaulding (Haig, who thankfully scrubs off that goofy clown make-up in the first few minutes). While hiding out at a scrappy sunburnt motel, they torture a few well-intentioned rednecks, then flee to Spaulding’s brother’s place (grinning pimp Charlie Altamont played by Ken Foree of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead).
Along the way, there are kills and spills, some nasty road splatter and a sherrif (William Forsythe) who becomes as bloodthirsty as the cannibal family he’s trying to track down. Some cameos by ‘70s horror vets PJ (Halloween) Soles, Michael (Hills Have Eyes) Berryman and Steve (Helter Skelter) Railsback keep us in a fanboy frame of mind, but all things told, the cameos are handled pretty deftly. On the down side, there are too many tasty but useless shots of Sheri Moon’s ***, some artless music montages, and Zombie’s myopic attempts to make his killers as cruel and inhuman as possible while also making them lovable and sympathetic.
But faced with two sides of the coin, my bet is The Devil’s Rejects succeeds on feel; the sun-bleached SoCal desert, a cast of snarling, scummy characters and the grooving ‘70s rock – it’s like some retro-cartoon rendered on hot asphalt with bullets and blood. Zombie’s gnarly homage to a gnarly decade of flicks may even prove he’s graduated out of the music video – sort of. A little more and he may actually become a respected film director; he isn’t there yet, but the road is open.
Rod Gudino